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A Mother's Love by Nathan
Warning: Mature subject matter July, 2088 Ma was sleeping again, which was the worst. It was worse than a beating with a wire hanger, even when the welts from the last whipping hadn't healed when the new ones cut bright streaks into the boy's hide. When ma was sleeping, she was just unavailable. She couldn't say 'No' when the boy wanted to eat, she couldn't yell or take the matches away when he wanted to cremate a plastic action figure that'd lost a leg in battle and was therefore deceased, and waking her up to ask to go outside would only get him a mumbled dismissal before she turned away from his face and went back to sleep. Not wanting to give her an excuse to come after him later, this left the boy to listen to the nearly inaudible holovid or play alone on the dirty rug in the one-room he shared with his mother. After a little while the boy got bored and laid down on the floor, imagining himself big enough to take the hanger away and cut those furrows into his mother's face and back with swift, sharp lashes that would take days to heal while they stung and burned, and in the moment that he imagined the sound of her sobbing with the pain he decided outside was better than in, to hell with the consequences, and off he went into the reaches of the domed city whose name he didn't care to know. It wasn't that the atmosphere-controlled mining colony didn't have a name, and it wasn't that the boy actually didn't know; he was old enough to know that his own name was nothing but something his mother screamed at him in that tone that dripped with disgust so names, no matter what they belonged to, weren't in his field of interest. He had a handful of friends in town, most of whom knew his ma. There was a bartender at the bar down the street who was always good to sneak the kid a bottle of something hard and nasty that he could barter for money or food or share with other kids who figured him for a pretty important guy if he could hook up real liquor. There were a couple of miners who'd let him sit with them under the pale, grayish haze that passed for a sunny day and give him some of what they were smoking or drinking, and there was always a ship at the port where somebody would let the kid aboard to have a look around. Those last were his favorite, mainly because they always thought they were showing the kid something new and talked about their engine rooms and cargo facilities with all the self-importance that goes along with giving a child a new experience. Today, he made his rounds to find that the bartender was on a day off, the miners weren't, and nobody he knew was logged in on the landing pad. After checking the regular hangouts for other kids and finding them all deserted, the boy ranged further out. He went beyond his neighborhood, then beyond his quadrant, and ended up in a marketplace where he didn't know any of the faces or the names to go with them. He wandered among the stalls looking at what was available, mostly unnoticed since he came up to most peoples' waists and couldn't see over the stall counters, until he spotted a man who had a fat wad of cash bills in his hand and was holding them low so those around couldn't see how much he was counting out. The boy's glimpse of bills and some of the numbers printed on the outside leaves told him that the wad would be more than ma made working nights for a week, so he threaded and squeezed his way between people until he was close enough to reach out, grab the money, and run. He made it to the edge of the marketplace and had put fair distance between himself and the man who had to shove his way through the throng, shouting and cursing, to chase, before somebody clutched a viselike hand around his upper arm. When he looked up and saw the white-trim-on-gray-uniform of a colony security officer, the boy could feel every lash he'd ever taken with a coat hanger or a belt heating up along his back and buttocks and legs and he knew this time it was going to be worse than ever. His money, the money he'd come to think of as his the moment he'd wrapped his fingers around it, was pried out of his skinny hand and returned to the owner who made a fist and backhanded the eight-year-old across the mouth for his trouble. The security officer gave the man a shove, but the boy was already tasting blood and thinking about what he'd do to the asshole who stopped him and the pig who hit him as soon as he was big enough to get it done. He was searched, the two plastic action figures in his pocket were thrown into the gutter, and then he was dragged along so fast that he was afraid he would be hauled off his feet and he could only keep up by jogging along with his pained arm being used a leash. At the security station they made some issue of getting his fingerprints by pressing his fingertips against a glass lens and taking his retina scan by holding his head still and prying his eyelids open and shining a bright red light into his eyes that hurt like a needle being stabbed into his brain. Then they stuck him in chair that was twice as big as he was in a bare room that had only a steel table, another chair, and a big window with a cheap two-way-mirror on the inside of it that even the boy could identify because of the shadows moving behind it. When someone came to talk to him it was a man in a civilian's business suit who looked irritated as he dropped into a chair and demanded to know, "What's your name, kid?" The boy didn't answer him, so the man sat there staring at him and the boy sat there staring back until the man reached across the table and slapped him hard across the eyes. The boy's head whipped to the side, and as he felt the skin heating up he turned his stare back on the man and imagined what he might look like stripped naked to the waist while a gargantuan figure flayed the skin off his body with a wire hanger. That mental image got boring quickly, and then the oversized figure of the boy untwisted the hanger into one long piece and used one end to gouge out the man's eyes while he screamed and begged for it to stop. Then, in the room with the man who worked for colony security, the boy started laughing and shook his head. The man got up abruptly and left, and the boy sat alone staring at the vague silhouettes he could see moving behind the mirror until those forms disappeared. Then the door to his room opened and a younger uniformed man came in with a woman in a suit-jacket and skirt. "Are you hungry?" the woman asked while the man sat down across from the boy and started tapping his fingertips silently against the metal table. When the boy didn't answer, staring at the man and trying without success to bring an image to mind of how he would torture him, the woman asked, "Thirsty?" When he still didn't answer, the man slowly took his eyes off the boy to look at the woman. "I don't think he speaks Standard." "He understands us," the woman answered, and when the boy's eyes darted toward her for a moment she said, "See?" "Whether he speaks it or not," the man told her, "he's not going to talk to us. What are we supposed to do with him? Can't put a kid like that in holding, and we don't have any social services out here." "He'll talk to us when he's ready," the woman answered. "I'm willing to bet right now he's trying to decide whether or not he should take out a gun and shoot us dead," her eyes shifted sidewise toward the boy and she smiled slyly, "or whether he'd be better off trying to talk his way out of trouble. -I- think he's a crafty one." The boy rolled his eyes and said, "I'm not stupid, and I don't have a gun." Just like that, the woman left the room and the uniformed young man turned back to the boy. "You have a name?" he asked. "Ma calls me a pain in the ass," the boy answered with a straight, unfriendly stare across the table. One of those dark forms reappeared behind the mirror, and he knew it was the woman going to watch. The man answered, "I don't doubt it a bit. You've been pain enough in ours. You've actually got one of our lieutenants drinking coffee and thanking God you're not one of his." "Keep kissing my ass," the boy answered disdainfully, "and I'm going to quit talking again. You're not getting my name," he played the card they had given him, "so unless you're going to put me in holding you might as well just let me go." "It's not going to be that easy," the man answered. "You stole something, and I imagine your father's going to tan your hide. Since you're not stupid, you probably know that already." "Dad's a piece of shit," the boy told him. "Probably you." The young man's jaw tightened and he sucked air through his front teeth. "You are a testy little bastard," he observed. "What about your mother?" The boy snorted and said, "She's a whore, like yours. At least mine's honest about it." The man made a fist and slammed it against the table, and all at once the boy achieved the image he hadn't been able to conjure of whipping him while he screamed. It made him laugh, and when he did the man got to his feet so fast his chair scraped the floor in jagged protest and he started toward the door. That shadow behind the mirror disappeared fast, but before the young man made it to the door he turned to take two swift strides toward the boy and with one closed fist he hit him hard in the lips. It only made the mental image change and that only made the boy laugh harder, and then the door burst open and the woman dragged the man to the door and shoved him out to slam it shut behind him. Then she walked toward the boy and slapped him hard with her open palm, on the side nobody had struck yet. Now, with his whole face hot, the boy stared silently and hard at the woman. He couldn't bring any images to mind. "Two lieutenants want to throw you into a holding cell with the child molestor we took last week, just to teach you a lesson about stealing!" she shouted at him, leaning down into the boy's face. "He and I are the only two who care about you, and right now I know he's telling them to lock you up and I'm right on the edge. If you don't give me a name and tell me where we can drop you off with the next noise you make, I'm going to let them have you." The boy shrank from her fury, remembering his mother's rageful face and the pain it always brought to him, and he squeaked, "Valentine Durant, Quadrant Three, the Refinery Boarding House." The woman left the room while the boy drew his knees to his chest and hugged his legs hard, and after a few minutes the man in civilian clothes came back into the room, took the boy by one ear which he twisted viciously until the boy let out a yelp, and then dragged him unceremoniously off the chair and took him outside to a waiting ground car. He rode in the back, behind a wire mesh cage, and neither he or the lieutenant said a word until they stopped outside the boarding house and the man got out to go inside. The boy sat there for what seemed like the longest wait of his life, until the man came out with his mother and the two of them stood talking at the bottom of the boarding house steps. Finally they took him out of the car, the man got in and drove away, and his mother led him silently back into the house. She didn't say a word to him, just slammed the door hard behind him and then laid down on the couch and went back to sleep. The boy went to sit in a corner, drew his knees back up to his chest, and waited for her to wake up. When she did she went into the shower, did her makeup, got dressed and left without saying a word to him and after she was gone the boy curled up on the couch and went to sleep himself. He dreamed of the beating he thought he would have gotten earlier. He dreamed of being stuck in a tiny cell with a man who chased him around the way he'd seen drunken miners chase his mother around a barroom when he had snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. He dreamed of waking up and seeing his mother kissing a man in tight black denim pants and a bulky armored vest. He dreamed of sleeping on a sandy beach under a blue sky, of cool water washing over his toes and warm sun bathing his face and bare chest. He dreamed the conversation he overheard in the room, near sunrise. "... a thousand credits. I know there's a trade." Laughter. "Urban legends, sweetheart. Think about it. You trade drugs, drugs get used. They don't talk. You trade people, people grow up, people talk. Why doesn't -everybody- know about it if it goes on?" "Bullshit! Everybody knows about drugs and everybody knows about the slave trade. I've done men who got themselves hot watching that shit on the holovid." "Even if that's true, why would -I- know any of those assholes?" "Come on, Vance. He's never been anything but trouble for me. If he was a girl, I'd have been making money off him for years." The man didn't answer for a long time until he finally said, "I'll give you two hundred," in a tone that sounded like the young cop who had hit the boy in the mouth earlier. "Nine! Come on. That underground shit sells for hundreds a disc. You can sell him to the people who make it for six times that." "I'll give you two fifty, and I won't radio colony security to tell them about you when we leave." "Eight. The goddamned little bastard already told them. Just today. I had to give the son of a bitching lieutenant who brought him home a free one just to get him off my back, and I'll probably be spreading for nothing twice a week for the next year." Vance was silent again for a long time before he said, "I'll give you six, not a credit more, and I'll take him with me now." The boy dreamed that the tide washed up the beach and picked him up while he slept on the sand, and that it rocked him into a deep, deep slumber as it carried him off. Category:OtherSpace Stories